Schekman Labs' research is devoted to a molecular description of the process of membrane assembly and vesicular traffic in eukaryotic cells. Basic principles that emerged from these studies in yeast are now being applied to studies of genetic diseases of protein transport. For the past dozen years, his lab has turned to a biochemical analysis of traffic in mammalian cells, including of the pathways of collagen secretion, autophagosome formation, and unconventional secretion. Of particular interest in clinical developments, he has decided to focus their attention on the mechanism of extracellular vesicle biogenesis with an emphasis on the means by which exosomes acquire a cell type-specific and highly sorted set of miRNAs. Another more recent interest is in the unconventional secretion of a protein implicated in Parkinson's Disease (PD), alpha-synuclein whose spread in the brain may be part of the pathology of PD.